Canada 150 Research Chair in Biological Dystopias

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Most societies ever initiated will end in ruin. We explore what allows some societies to flourish while others wither and die. We approach this topic by engineering experimental societies with different collective attributes (demographics, compositions, architectures) and then evaluating their performance in the lab and field. We further probe the factors that promote societal resilience. We’ve shown that some societies can sense their forthcoming demise and deploy social adaptations to circumvent would-be extinction and bounce back from persistent, disadvantageous social states. Not unlike humans, many societies reside on the tipping point between transformative success and imminent eradication.